The government of Pará instituted the Plano Estadual Amazônia Agora (PEAA), which aims to "raise Pará to the stage of Net Zero Emissions, or Carbon Neutrality, for land use change impacts and the forestry sector from 2036" through State Decree No. 941/2020. This legislation foresees achieving this objective through the reduction of illegal deforestation and increasing the extent of secondary forests. RAS contributed to the PEAA by providing data to estimate CO2 removal rates by secondary forests in Pará.
RAS has been contributing with recommendations and suggestions to draft laws in the Brazilian legislature. An important example is the National Integrated Fire Management Policy (Política Nacional de Manejo Integrado do Fogo), which aimed to promote regulations related to integrated fire management, reduce the incidence and damage of forest fires, and restore the socio-ecological and cultural role of fire. Along with other researchers, the RAS team participated in the review of this bill, bringing decades of scientific evidence on ecological and social aspects of fire management in the Amazon region.
RAS collaborated in the drafting of Normative Instruction 07 of 2015, which replaced Normative Instruction No. 2 of 2014. In this new legislation, new rules were defined for the suppression of secondary vegetation in Pará, depending on the level of forest cover of each municipality in the state. Municipalities with less forest cover now have a lower threshold for the suppression of secondary vegetation given priorities for restoration.
RAS contributed the scientific evidence basis to inform a simple and practical way of classifying variable-aged secondary vegetation in the state of Pará. It was the first regulation of this type for any state in the Brazilian Amazon. Based on the developed method, it is possible to classify secondary forests into initial, intermediate or advanced stages, which reflects the ecological importance of the evaluated forests. This analysis served as the basis for a new law (Instruction No. 2 of 2014), which established rules for the preservation of secondary forest areas in the state of Pará. The effort was the result of a collaboration between several researchers and regional institutions, such as the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, TNC and the Federation of Industries of the State of Pará (Fiepa: Federação das Indústrias do Estado do Pará), among others.